Games With A Purpose

@davidrfgomes

42% of Americans play video games regularly (3 hours or more per week)[1]

379,260,000 million hours spent per week on video games, only in America

[1] Entertainment Software Associaton, April 2015
The most frequent gamers who play with others spend an average of 6.5 hours per week playing with others online.[1]

We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.[2]

[2] http://www.ted.com/conversations/44/we_spend_3_billion_hours_a_wee.html
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

For the first time in human history, hundreds of millions of people can, via the Internet, easily collaborate on the same problem.
Through online games, people can collectively solve large-scale computational problems. Such games constitute a general mechanism for using brain power to solve open problems. People will play such games to be entertained, not to solve a problem - no matter the objective.

Luis Von Ahn

The ESP Game

(acquired by Google)
In the first four months of its operation, the ESP Game generated more than a million labels for more than a quarter of a million images.

CAPTCHA

Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart

reCAPTCHA

The reCAPTCHA Project lies at the intersection of cyber security, technology, and the ongoing effort by several commercial and non-profit organizations to digitize printed information.

(acquired by Google)

Duolingo

Duolingo is a free language-learning platform that includes a language-learning app along with a crowdsourced text translation platform and a language proficiency assessment center.

$83.3M in 4 Rounds from 14 Investors

Another kind of purpose

A social approach

Spent

Unmanned

World Without Oil

WordTap

People play not because they are personally interested in solving an instance of a computational problem but because they wish to be entertained.

Making tedious work fun

Most people enjoy intellectual challenges in a variety of different contexts, one of these being video games.

Making tedious work fun

  • Non stop
  • Flashy animations
  • Feeling of cooperation
  • Challenging
  • Scoring

Key Factors

  • Why will people want to play the game?
  • Do your players care about the purpose of the game?
  • Metrics & A/B Testing
  • Saved Sessions
  • As much as a "real game" as possible
  • Social helps
  • Mobile

Thank you.

Keep playing and making games everyone.

http://davidgom.es

@davidrfgomes